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The Trial, Franz Kafka (1915)

The most Kafka-esque of Kafka’s work

by
Liel Leibovitz
September 17, 2013

If you haven’t or haven’t in a while, take this book and read the small portion of it that is the parable known as “Before the Law”: A man awaits his turn at justice, is warned that many guards stand watch to keep him from his goal, and then, on death’s bed, is informed that the path was always his own personal one and that it was always open. What does it mean? Like the rest of the book, and the rest of Kafka’s work, it inspired some of the best minds to see anything from a critique of rabbinic Judaism to a reinterpretation of the messianic ideal. But Kafka being Kafka, the point is beside the point: Frustrating and beautiful, immediate yet just outside of our reach, simultaneously sensible and strange, the book feels like the crystallization of 20th-century Jewish thought, its hero, like its readers, facing shocking calamities yet never losing sight of his roots or his touch for humanity at large.

Liel Leibovitz is a senior writer for Tablet Magazine and a host of the Unorthodox podcast.

Liel Leibovitz is editor-at-large for Tablet Magazine and a host of its weekly culture podcast Unorthodox and daily Talmud podcast Take One. He is the editor of Zionism: The Tablet Guide.